Hartmut Austen’s paintings originate from photographic and figurative sources filtered through his personal ideology. While his paintings may be ambiguous and abstract, they are rooted in the authentic, the political, and the real. His archival material of found images: photographs, Xeroxes and clippings – brings legitimacy to his paintings because of the aura/value inherent in an extant image. Therefore, his work occupies two realms: the real world which is archival and architectural and his interior world which is impenetrable and ideological involving the filtering of subjective narrative through abstraction and use of color.